Media Organization – Term Paper

Creating a Culture of Quality in Media Organization

Organizational culture is one of the fundamental areas that determine its ability to remain competitive in the modern industries. Given that competition in the media industry has continued to increase in the recent past, it is paramount that the media organizations develop a culture of quality to remain competitive. For the organizations to achieve realize the development of this culture, there are several areas that they should focus their efforts including employee ownership, empowerment, involvement, message credibility and maintaining leadership focus on quality. This paper seeks to review actions that a media organization should take to improve the quality culture in these areas. 

Employee Ownership and Empowerment

For organizations to create a culture of employee ownership and empowerment, various measures can be taken. First, there is need to create a vision by adopting a model where the staff participation is encouraged (Schein 2010). For example, when determining the quality levels of the news items that a media organization is supposed to provide it is critical to involve the staff in establishing the expected goals as this makes the employees own the vision and hence work towards its realization (Morden 2016). The media organization should then determine the communication values which in essences enables the staff to be able to provide information regarding quality without fear of any form of negative consequences. 

Other measures that the organization should take to improve ownership and empowerment include delegating responsibility to staff. When staffs are required to take the responsibility of the decisions on quality in a media organization, their sense of ownership for the content provided is likely to increase and in the process, also lead to increased empowerment (Schein 2010). The organization also needs to provide the prerequisite training for the staff to ensure that they understand the value of taking ownership during the process of generating information content from the media organization. The organization should also regularly review the levels of staff ownership and empowerment in making decisions regarding product quality and provide the required encouragement to ensure that it continues to increase. 

Encouraging Peer Involvement

Peer involvement in the organization seeks to ensure that individual employees are treated as a unique human being ad are involved in enabling the organization pursues its main goals. In a media organization where the peer involvement is encouraged, the organization seeks to solicit the inputs of the staff, and the management seeks to demonstrate that the contributions of each team member are integral in the running of the business. For media organizations to encourage peer involvement in their operations there two main strategies that they need to adopt. 

The first approach towards increasing peer involvement is anchored on company financial aspects. The sharing of organization ownership through methods such as allocating shares to the staff or allocating a portion of the profits to the staff has been shown to increase peer involvement in enabling organizations to develop a culture of quality (Morden 2016). By sharing the financial gains, the media organization will be able to generate a higher level of interest among the staff which would be otherwise difficult to elicit under routine workplace operations. The existing literature indicates that over 50% percent of all the employees who owned shares in an organization felt more committed to facilitating the company to achieve the desired level of success (Schein 2010). Hence developing a share ownership program would be an effective method to facilitate media organization to achieve higher involvement in its pursuit for quality. 

Secondly, a media organization that guarantees its staff of job security can encourage peer involvement. When staff members have doubt about their stay in the organization, it is hard for them to develop a sense of belonging and hence makes it hard to get involved in the operations (Schein 2010). Thus, a media organization that seeks to increase peer involvement needs to provide the staff with job security and have a clear policy on how to conduct layoffs. By adopting such an approach, the staff can be motivated to get involved and facilitate the media organization to pursue the goal of providing quality.  

Ensuring Message Credibility

A media organization that seeks to ensure that there is message credibility as part of promoting organization quality as a culture needs to implement the “Credible Brand Model” (Morden 2016). Under this model, the credibility of the message is based on customer-based brand equity dimension. Thus, the image that a media house tends to project is critical in influencing the credibility of the messages that it provides. Based on this, it is paramount that an organization that seeks to increase the credibility of their messages should train their staff on the integral role that branding plays (Schein 2010). The staff should ensure that when providing their information, the sources remain prominent so that the consumers can associate the media house with the provision of reliable information. The training should also equip the staff with information on how to make the messages provided to be easily navigable as the consumers of media information tend to determine credibility based on how easily the can navigate the messages provided. Media organizations should regularly evaluate the credibility perception of the messages with the staff and the consumers and ensure that feedback is provided to the concerned parties to initiate necessary improvements. 

Leadership Emphasis on Quality

Media organizations that seek to ensure that their leadership sustains efforts towards emphasizing the need for quality should adopt various strategic measures. The organizational leaders should work towards defining what constitutes quality within the media organization. Based on the definition, the leaders should identify areas where the media house needs to make improvements. Given that sustainability can only be achieved through regular evaluations, it is paramount for the leaders in the media organization to engage in regular forums to evaluate the progress (Morden 2016). The progress should by evaluating the decisions that have been made over a period to determine if they mirror the organization goal of ensuring quality. When inconsistencies are found, the leaders should lay out strategies to rectify the situation and steer the organization towards pursuing quality. 

References

Morden, T., 2016. Principles of strategic management. London: Routledge. 

Schein, E.H., 2010. Organizational culture and leadership. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.